In Edinburgh to speak about my new novel Zoo Time at the book festival. I love it up here, watching the rain lashing the austere grey terraces, dodging the street clowns who don’t really belong in so serious a place, visiting the Victorian dead in the marvellously voluble Dean Cemetery (it’s the stones that do the speaking, not the dead), and enjoying the view of Fettes from the window of my hotel. Built in the grand Scots baronial style to educate orphans and the poor, Fettes looks more like a lunatic asylum than a school. If I had a telescope I believe I’d be able to spot Mrs Rochester roaming through those spires, spitting and setting fire to herself. Tony Blair, who coincidentally referred to Gordon Brown as the mad wife in the attic, was a pupil of Fettes.
